5Rhythms then, now and forever…

Rushing through old stuff, searching for some material to build a 5Rhythms art installation, I found bits and pieces of my graduate work from the Art Academy, from almost 20 years ago. This is long before I even heard of the 5 Rhythms.

As an artist I was specialised in building environments, sceneries, filling spaces with objects, installations and video projections; turning them into spaces to experience, confronting our believes and deepening
our lives.

I was surprised to find my almost forgotten sketches and studies for “Collage des Bijoux”, the title of my graduate work, for which I found inspiration in
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Fibonacci’s Number Sequence and Spiral.

What struck me was that only now I realised the base for this art installation had been 5;
I built a pentagram space with 5 elements:
5 installations, each with a video projection, representing something about life and death; how dead life can be and how lively death…

Almost 20 years ago I made scripts, storyboards and models to be able to realise this project and now I was baffled to see that
I used the 5 Rhythms without even knowing them then.

I connected each of the five installations to a phase of life, an element, a sense, like the 5 Rhythms map does…

One installation was about the absolute beginning, a seed pulsing; the next about what we do in life with choices, boundaries, decisions, measurements; the third about control, control of life and control of death, not letting go of anything; the fourth about the lack of breath in our society, how difficult it is to fully live our life as a unique human being, the fifth about the end, the cycle of coming and going, the end as a promise for a new beginning…

And as a red thread through all 5 installations
I used elements of the ocean; its waves, its sound, its salt…

While going through this old material, it was like dancing through a Wave; I felt deeply connected with how much my life has changed over the last 20 years; I remember how I found the rhythms, how I embraced them as my home, and now through my art installations I discovered they have been in me much longer than I was aware of…

of course… the rhythms are my home… then and now and forever…

5Rhythms then, now and forever… november 27th, 2017Caroline van de Ven